[Most Recent Entries] [Calendar View]
Thursday, July 27th, 2017
| Time | Event |
| 11:00a | Watch the Earliest Known Footage of the Jimi Hendrix Experience (February, 1967) Note: If the video plays and you don't hear sound, look for the volume control in the lower right hand corner of the video. Within months of moving to London in autumn of 1966, Jimi Hendrix found himself a band, recorded a single, got himself a longterm girlfriend, and proceeded to take the UK by storm. His gigs were essential viewing by rock’s then-royalty--the Who, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Cream, all made sure they caught the American wonder. By the end of the year his first single “Hey Joe” landed him on British television and in the Top 10. The above video is the first known footage of a live Jimi Hendrix Experience, though the band had been gigging for months. It takes place at the Chelmsford Corn Exchange, in the City of Chelmsford, about 50 miles north-east of London. The date is February 25, 1967, and the gig had only been advertised in the paper two days before (where he was listed as “Jimi Hendric”). As you can see, that’s all it took to fill this old traders building-turned-rock venue to the rafters. The footage was shot for “Telixer: A Thing of Beat Is a Joy Forever,” a documentary on the current British music scene made for KRO, The Netherlands. Hendrix and the band launch into Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” with a few ordinary opening bars setting up the guitar magic to follow. He then plays “Stone Free,” the b-side of “Hey Joe.” You can see Pete Townshend and John Entwistle to the side of the stage, very briefly. The footage is intercut with shots of Swinging London and fashion hub Portobello Road, where it is said Hendrix bought his Hussars military jacket. The website Chelmsford Rocks features a remembrance of that night from Shaun Everett, who was a Mod at the time and knew he had to make his way up on the train after work to catch Hendrix at the “Corn’ole,” as the youth called it. Everett fills in the rest of the evening:
The Corn Exchange hosted many acts over its time as a music venue, including David Bowie and Pink Floyd. But in 1969, the city tore down the 19th century building, assuming something more accommodating for live music would be built in its place. That didn’t happen. On this page you can see the aftermath of the bulldozers, and a modern shot of the city street corner that added so much to rock history. Related Content: Jimi Hendrix Wreaks Havoc on the Lulu Show, Gets Banned From the BBC (1969) Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW's Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here. Watch the Earliest Known Footage of the Jimi Hendrix Experience (February, 1967) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.  |
| 5:00p | People Who Swear Are More Honest Than Those Who Don’t, Finds a New University Study
I’ve heard it said many times: “I don’t trust people who don’t swear.” It’s not an empirical statement. Just an intuition, that people who shy away from salty language might also shy away from certain truths—may even be, perhaps, a little delusional. Few people characterize teetotalers of swearing with more bite than Stephen Fry, who believes “the sort of twee person who thinks swearing is in any way a sign of a lack of education or of a lack of verbal interest is just a fucking lunatic.” George Carlin would approve. A comically exaggerated view. No, swearing isn't necessarily a sign of mental illness. But it does correlate strongly with truthtelling. It seems all the suspicious salts out there may have happened upon a measurable phenomenon. A study published last year with the cheeky title “Frankly, We Do Give a Damn: The Relationship Between Profanity and Honesty,” notes, “the consistent findings across the studies suggest that the positive relation between profanity and honesty is robust, and that relationship found at the individual level indeed translates to the society level.” It’s true, some research shows that people who swear may be likely to violate other social norms, god bless ‘em, but they are also less likely to lie during police interrogations. After reviewing the literature, the researchers, led by Maastricht University Psychologist Gilad Feldman, describe the results of their own experiments. They asked 276 people to report on their swearing habits (or not) in detail. Those people then took a psychological test that measured their levels of honesty. Next, the team analyzed 70,000 social media interactions, and reported that “profanity and honesty were found to be significantly and positively correlated, indicating that those who used more profanity were more honest in their Facebook status updates.” They did not say whether high levels of honesty on Facebook is desirable. Finally, Feldman and his colleagues widened their scope to 48 U.S. states, and were able to correlate social media data with measures of government accountability. States with higher levels of swearing had a higher integrity score according to a 2012 index published by the Center for Public Integrity. (Believe or not, New Jersey had some of the highest scores.) All three of their studies yielded similar results. “At both the individual and society level,” they conclude, “we found that a higher rate of profanity use was associated with more honesty.” This does not mean, as Ephrat Livni writes at Quartz, that “people who curse like sailors” won’t “commit serious ethical crimes—but they won’t pretend all’s well online.” As to the question of whether swearing betrays a lack of education and an impoverished vocabulary, we might turn to linguist, psychologist, and neuroscientist Steven Pinker, who has made a learned defense of foul language, in drily humorous talks, books, and essays. “When used judiciously,” he writes in a 2008 Harvard Brain article, “swearing can be hilarious, poignant, and uncannily descriptive.” His is an argument that relies not only on data but on philosophical reflection and literary appreciation. “It’s a fact of life that people swear,” he says, and so, it’s a fact of art. Shakespeare invented dozens of swears and was never afraid to work blue. Perhaps that’s why we find his representations of humanity so perennially honest. You can read “Frankly, We Do Give a Damn: The Relationship Between Profanity and Honesty" here. In addition to Gilad Feldman, the research paper was also written by Huiwen Lian (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology,) Michal Kosinski (Stanford), and David Stillwell (Cambridge). Related Content: Stephen Fry, Language Enthusiast, Defends The “Unnecessary” Art Of Swearing Steven Pinker Explains the Neuroscience of Swearing (NSFW) George Carlin Performs His “Seven Dirty Words” Routine: Historic and Completely NSFW Free Online Psychology & Neuroscience Courses Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness People Who Swear Are More Honest Than Those Who Don’t, Finds a New University Study is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
| 5:30p | Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Illustrated by Salvador Dalí in 1969, Finally Gets Reissued
On canvas and paper, Salvador Dalí created apparently nonsensical realities that nevertheless operated according to logic all their own; in writing, Lewis Carroll, author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, did the very same. It thus only makes sense, despite their differences in nationality and sensibility as well as their barely overlapping life spans, that their artistic worlds — one with its grotesquely misshapen objects, obscure symbols, and hauntingly empty vistas, the other full of wordplay, whimsy, and mathematics — would one day collide. It happened in 1969, when an editor at Random House commissioned the master surrealist to create illustrations for an exclusive edition of Carroll's timeless story for the house's book-of-the-month club.
"Dalí created twelve heliogravures — a frontispiece, which he signed in every copy from the edition, and one illustration for each chapter of the book," writes Brain Pickings' Maria Popova. "For more than half a century, this unusual yet organic cross-pollination of genius remained an almost mythic artifact, reserved for collectors and scholars," until Princeton University Press saw fit to reprint it for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland's 150th anniversary (much as Taschen recently reissued Dalí's bizarre cookbook Les Diners de Gala). Sweetening the deal still further, they've included essays by mathematician and Dalí collaborator Thomas Banchoff as well as Lewis Carroll Society of North America president Mark Burstein.
"Although the outrageousness of Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who came up with the pen name Lewis Carroll in 1856, was limned within a conventional fairy tale," writes Burstein, "the surrealists deliberately sought outrage and provocation in their art and lives and questioned the nature of reality. For both Carroll and the surrealists, what some call madness could be perceived by others as wisdom." He describes surrealism's initial objective as making "accessible to art the realms of the unconscious, the irrational, and the imaginary, and its influence soon went far beyond the visual arts and literature, embracing music, film, theater, philosophy, and popular culture. As have the Alice books." And with so many realms of the unconscious, the irrational, and the imaginary left to explore, this intersection of Carroll and Dalí's different yet compatible methods of exploration should hold more appeal than ever. You can find copies of the Princeton reissue of Dalí's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland here. Related Content: The Tarot Card Deck Designed by Salvador Dalí Salvador Dalí’s 1973 Cookbook Gets Reissued: Surrealist Art Meets Haute Cuisine Salvador Dalí’s Avant-Garde Christmas Cards Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Illustrated by Salvador Dalí in 1969, Finally Gets Reissued is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
| 8:00p | Watch 50 Hours of Nature Soundscapes from the BBC: Scientifically Proven to Ease Stress and Promote Happiness & Awe A recent study from BBC Earth and UC-Berkeley has shown that watching nature documentaries can inspire "significant increases in feelings of awe, contentedness, joy, amusement and curiosity" and conversely "reduce feelings of tiredness, anger and stress." In short, they can engender what the authors of the study call ‘real happiness’ – a kind of happiness that leads to actual improvement in individuals’ health and wellbeing, With that in mind, the BBC has just released 50 hours of HD "visual soundscapes" on YouTube, using leftover footage from their Planet Earth II TV series. Ten hours of mountains; ten hours of jungle; ten hours of islands; ten hours of desert; and ten hours of grasslands--they're all featured in the long, soothing soundscape playlist featured above. Use them well. Follow Open Culture on Facebook and Twitter and share intelligent media with your friends. Or better yet, sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox. If you'd like to support Open Culture and our mission, please consider making a donation to our site. It's hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us provide the best free cultural and educational materials. Related Content: Moby Lets You Download 4 Hours of Ambient Music to Help You Sleep, Meditate, Do Yoga & Not Panic Watch 50 Hours of Nature Soundscapes from the BBC: Scientifically Proven to Ease Stress and Promote Happiness & Awe is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
| << Previous Day |
2017/07/27 [Calendar] |
Next Day >> |